Have iPhone, will travel—without a data plan

You can still use maps, navigate, and consume content without cellular data.

With an iPhone as a travel companion, navigating strange places can be a breeze. Just open up the maps application of your choice and, through the magic of GPS and GLONASS, you instantly know where you are. Detailed directions to your destination are only a few taps away—if you have a data plan, that is. But sometimes there's just no coverage. And when traveling abroad, cellular data can be really expensive.

Fortunately, by installing the right apps and preparing ahead of time, the iPhone can still be very functional on the road, even without a data connection.

(But first, a tip: if you are traveling abroad and you have an unlocked GSM-compatible iPhone, you can often get a temporary SIM card with a local phone number and a data plan that doesn't break the bank. Try searching the Web for "tourist SIM" along with the country or city name.)

“No data” doesn't mean “no Wi-Fi”

Losing your always-on cellular data connection is one thing, but being completely disconnected from the world Internet for days at a time is much worse. As such, you'll probably want to be able to find Wi-Fi hotspots. Free Wi-Fi is widely available these days, but you'd be surprised how hard it can be to find it when you really need it. I wish I could recommend a good Wi-Fi finder app, but unfortunately, I haven't found any that both have a large enough database of hotspots and a usable offline mode. Wi-Fi Finder and WiFi-Map come the closest. The former has a good database but won't show it to you on the map in offline mode, and the latter shows you cached Wi-Fi networks around you but without a map underneath. There are also numerous city, country, or paid hotspot network-specific Wi-Fi finder apps that can be useful.

In airports and some hotels, you may be limited to paid hotspots only. In hotels you sometimes get 24 hours when you buy a day pass. What I tend to do in those cases—mostly out of spite—is wait an hour before I activate it. That way, when I get back to the hotel at the same time the next day, I still have an hour of Wi-Fi use without buying another pass. In general, paid hotspot networks have unattractive fee structures if you only use them a few times a year. A good solution to this can be Skype Wi-Fi, which lets you use your Skype credit to access Wi-Fi networks. The rates can be a bit steep at $0.05-0.25 a minute, but if you only need a few minutes, it's a good deal. On iOS, Skype Wi-Fi has its own app, separate from the regular Skype app.

Maps at your service

The most critical smartphone application when traveling is the maps app. Fortunately, iPhone users have many to choose from these days. They all cache map data to some degree, and the vector-based maps degrade more gracefully than bitmap-based map tiles. For casual use, you can simply have a look at your destination in Apple's or Google's maps application, and you'll probably be fine. You can even load directions ahead of time—but you can't get them back once they're gone. Don't forget to add important places as bookmarks in Maps or add them to your contacts.

If you're going to cover more ground and/or getting lost is not an option, it's a good idea to use an app that has offline mapping capabilities. For example, the NAVIGON and TomTom apps provide turn-by-turn directions without an active data connection. There are many more choices if you just want offline maps and don't need turn-by-turn driving directions. Search the app store for "offline map" or a city guide for your destination city.

I'm a long-time user of MotionX GPS. It can show "MotionX Road" (OpenStreetMap), "MotionX Terrain" (OpenCycleMap), NOAA marine maps, and different types of Bing and Apple maps, but it can only download for offline use the OpenStreetMap, OpenCycleMap, and NOAA data. You can select the zoom level when downloading maps to get the right trade-off between download size and map detail.

The iPhone normally uses assisted GPS, which means that it loads some data over the Internet to make location fixes happen faster. But the GPS also works unassisted—you don't need a data connection as long as the iPhone isn't in airplane mode. That said, after a long flight, it can take a long time (minutes) for the first GPS fix to happen. Connecting to a Wi-Fi network and then opening an app that uses location services solves this, making subsequent location fixes much faster. If that's not an option, just leave an app that uses GPS open and eventually you'll get a lock. Although the iPhone can sometimes get GPS locks inside, you really want to be outside, preferably with a clear view of the sky, to obtain that first lock.

Navigating your surroundings

Navigating to the mother ship with MotionX GPS.

Apart from downloading maps for offline use, I also use MotionX GPS to find my way in strange cities. I do this by creating "waypoints" for important locations, such as the place where I'm staying and the sights I want to see. The waypoints are of course overlaid on the downloaded map, but MotionX GPS also lets you navigate toward waypoints by showing an arrow pointing in the right direction using a compass view, along with the distance and expected travel time at the current speed. This is much cruder than turn-by-turn directions, but it still reduces aimless wandering around a strange city. You can also quickly add a waypoint for your current location so you can find your way back later.

I once went on a trip with a few others, and we created a Google Map with all the places we wanted to see on it. You can export the list of marked locations in KML format and then convert them to GPX and import as waypoints in MotionX GPS—which is much easier than adding a long list of waypoints directly on the iPhone.

I always scour the Web for public transit maps before I visit a city. I prefer a PDF version, which you can sync to the iBooks app through iTunes or transfer to iBooks from Safari—the button for this shows up after tapping the displayed PDF. Sometimes the transit authority has an app in the app store, which typically has maps that are better optimized for the iPhone's screen size. There are also many city guides with good transit maps.

An invaluable resource for planning a trip is WikiTravel, available in app form as iTravelFree, which lets you download city guides for offline reference.

Content is king

The boring parts of traveling are a great time to catch up on TED talks, which are conveniently available in a variety of lengths. Although the the TED app can download talks for offline viewing (with subtitles in 90 languages!), I download and sync the talks through the iTunes feed. When on cycling trips I listen to more podcasts than ever, which creates a strange relationship in my brain between the podcast's subject matter and the place where I listened to it—from then on, one will always remind me of the other. I always save up a few episodes of Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase! to get in the mood before I fly.

Under iOS 6 you can save webpages for later reading in Safari so you never have to be without something to read. Or load up on books that are out of copyright through Project Gutenberg. Download the ePub version for reading in the iBooks app. I also like to catch up on my Google Reader RSS feeds with Byline.

A year ago, my passport was stolen when driving from Madrid to Barcelona over Christmas. It turns out that it's really helpful to be able to show a copy of that stolen passport to get all the paperwork in order. Who knew? So I now carry scans of every document and card that I may conceivably need to consult during my travels. I store those—as well as a list of passwords to my frequent flier accounts, Skype, and so on—in the Air Sharing app. It's a bit more expensive than I'd like, but crucially, Air Sharing can be locked with a password. Speaking of scanning: rather than bringing that flat-bed scanner, you may want to get Genius Scan in case you need to scan on the go. Genius Scan creates pretty decent scans using the iPhone's built-in camera.

If you want to test your iPhone in "no data plan" mode, you can turn off cellular data in Settings, General, Cellular.

What else?

These are just our basic (but useful) tips for getting around the globe without having to rely on cellular data, but we're sure you have extra tips to add. Let us know how you manage your travels on your iPhone in the comments.

Iljitsch van Beijnum
Iljitsch is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, where he contributes articles about network protocols as well as Apple topics. He is currently finishing his Ph.D work at the telematics department at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in Spain. Emaililjitsch.vanbeijnum@arstechnica.com//Twitter@iljitsch

I remember doing some of the things on article a year ago on my trip to China.There were problems though. Like i was in The middle of no where and my 3gs wouldn't give me a fix on gps for 15 minutes. That's i think because of assisted gps. When you go to a new city it needs at least to connect to internet once to start working.

The second problem: never trusted my caches! Always found myself in a place outside of cached maps! That's where i found xGPS. A cydia app which actually saves google maps and you know they are way better than open street maps and apple maps. I would download the whole city map by night at hotel and the next day would go antwhere without problem!

When in Europe I will call up the place I am going to on the Wifi I am at, then move along the route that I am going at a close detail. Seems to work for keeping the information on the phone so when you are travelling and don't have data one can still have a good map to navigate by as well as directions if I want. If I haven't zoomed on the route and it can make it awkward with missing areas when travelling. Also gives me a sense of what to expect so I highly recommend it when travelling from place to place.

AT&T has an international data plan that you can turn on for 1 month. I did the $60 300MB plan which includes 1GB of free wifi if you can find a place that offers it. It might sound expensive but it turned out to be indispensible for my 3 week trip to South America. With Android you get much better control over data usage and monitoring so with judiscious use I stayed just under the limit without having to go out of my way to find free wifi (which I've always been hesitant about using anyway) or really changing my smartphone usage much at all.

AT&T has an international data plan that you can turn on for 1 month. I did the $60 300MB plan which includes 1GB of free wifi if you can find a place that offers it. It might sound expensive but it turned out to be indispensible for my 3 week trip to South America. With Android you get much better control over data usage and monitoring so with judiscious use I stayed just under the limit without having to go out of my way to find free wifi (which I've always been hesitant about using anyway) or really changing my smartphone usage much at all.

I ended up spending a boatload with AT&T last time I went to Ireland, even with international plans enabled. They were surprisingly willing to unlock both my phone and my finacees phone (both still under contract) no questions asked, though. We'll both be getting 1GB data SIMs from Meteor or O2 while we're there. $10/ea is the way to go.

I remember once I thought I had turned off all the data aps while visiting Egypt, only to the next morning that annoying stock ticker crap scrlling across the top of my phone... And a pop-up in Arabic (local SIM) telling me something.

Fortunately, it appears that only used a few dollars of data.

the annoying thing is that you cannot easily see what is and is not using or wanting to use data. On the same trip we woke up in the morning to find the iPad complaining that my free iCloud (5GB) was full. We had uploaded the camera card the night before, and i guess it happily uploaded that to the cloud on wifi overnight because photostream was being backed up. Not sure the hotel was impressed, but fortunately it was wifi.

In airports and some hotels, you may be limited to paid hotspots only. In hotels you sometimes get 24 hours when you buy a day pass. What I tend to do in those cases—mostly out of spite—is wait an hour before I activate it. That way, when I get back to the hotel at the same time the next day, I still have an hour of Wi-Fi use without buying another pass.

I'm not exactly sure how this helps anything...you still would just get 24 hours.

Why can't the GPS fall back to standalone receiver operation if a data connection is unavailable?

It is my understanding, the assisted GPS is used to find a rough location quickly, and then pinpoint the GPS location much quicker than what it'd take to wait for a 5-satellite fix.

If that's true, then they are basically crippling GPS functionality by making it unusable without a data connection, for the sake of perceived usability (faster GPS lock times). That's lame. Why can't both be offered?

I have a Garmin wristwatch with GPS accurate down to 10 or 20 feet or whatever it is. If standalone GPS receiver fits in a wristwatch, it would fit in a smartphone.

AT&T has an international data plan that you can turn on for 1 month. I did the $60 300MB plan which includes 1GB of free wifi if you can find a place that offers it.

Yes - this. Their plans are *much* more sensible than they used to be - and you can even "back date" your start date if you go over the limit. (which you definitely need to monitor!) It fills in the gaps between Wi-fi hotspots, but otherwise, Airplane Mode is your friend when abroad.

Also, there are many touristy "city guide" types of apps that download data to your device so you have access to key maps, locations, and info for stuff, even when offline. Just Google around for the cities you are hitting before your trip. TripAdvisor caches data locally, as one example, but there are many others.

All that being said, the iPhone (or heck - any smartphone) is the best. invention. ever. for international travel.

Next time I head to Europe I will install some kind of audio guide for the big ticket attractions so I don't need to rent the stupid handheld wands that are offered. A quick google found Rick Steve's version, it also has Android/iPhone apps to make it easier: http://www.ricksteves.com/news/audio-tours.htm

Visiting, say the Parthenon is cool but having a personal guide explaining what your seeing is even better, and much cheaper.

When I traveled to England, France, and Germany in September 2012, I brought my iPhone4 with me even though I had stopped using the phone and it was basically an iPod Touch (I had moved to T-Mobile in February 2012 and gotten a new phone). The GPS was nice to have, but I had to use the WiFi the night before to load all levels of the map (e.g., various levels of zoom-in). The next day, when out and about without any WiFi or 3G/cellular service, I'd still be able to see the blue dot on the Maps app, and it would move with me.

If I had zoomed in and loaded the map the night before, the map would resolve and I'd be able to use the map. I couldn't search for anything, of course. If I hadn't zoomed in or covered all the areas where I had planned to be, I'd still see myself as a blue dot, but on a gray grid without a map.

In short, WiFi was essential, because without it, I wouldn't have been able to tell where I was.

i was in The middle of no where and my 3gs wouldn't give me a fix on gps for 15 minutes. That's i think because of assisted gps. When you go to a new city it needs at least to connect to internet once to start working.

The opposite is true. Your problem is assisted GPS doesn't work when you have no data connection. If you had assisted GPS, it would have worked instantly. Without assisted GPS it can take a long time to connect (especially if you turn your phone off, fly around the world, then turn it on again).

When it can't use the data network to get a rough lock on your location, the GPS will assume you're still somewhere close to where you were last time you used it, which will obviously be wrong, and in that situation it takes the satellites *twelve minutes* to send enough data for the phone to figure out your location (and that's assuming you have perfect reception).

So if your GPS doesn't work when you first try to use it, just leave it open for a while, perhaps as long as 30 minutes, it will eventually work. Being outside or near a window will help. Alternatively do a location lookup while on the airport's wifi, that will work instantly and when you leave wifi the GPS will assume you're somewhere near that wifi network, allowing it to get a quick fix on your position.

Also, with regard to apps that work worldwide... Sygic has very good data in Australia and they're based in Europe so presumably the same is true there.

Dilbert wrote:

I have a Garmin wristwatch with GPS accurate down to 10 or 20 feet or whatever it is. If standalone GPS receiver fits in a wristwatch, it would fit in a smartphone.

Your garmin wristwatch is an inferior GPS to a typical smartphone. In situations where the phone doesn't work very well (takes a long time to connect, etc), the wristwatch will be even worse. In my testing, my smartphone is accurate to about 3 feet in ideal conditions.

There are two problems: one is the antenna is too small, GPS really needs to have a big antenna (as in, the ones you might see on a navy ship), the other problem is the satellites take a very long time to send enough data to figure out your location. All GPS units do a bunch of complicated stuff to try and solve those two issues, and some of the techniques are possible in a smartphone but not possible in a wristwatch.

Assisted GPS is *better* than just plain old GPS. Many of the issues GPS has are solved by A-GPS.

Avenza PDF Maps is an app I usually use with free government-produced topo maps but you can also buy tourist maps for cities from within the app. It uses a georeferenced PDF file and marks your location on it with GPS, no data connection needed.

Lol. When I was travelling through Hong Kong and Macau (and being from NZ with ridiculous roaming 3G costs), I ended up taking photos of maps on the bus stops and navigating via that.

This just gave me an idea. Are there any apps that let you take a picture of a map, then define a few GPS spots on the map and from then on, it's able to give you your general location on the map?

It won't have the accuracy of live maps or an offline navigation app but it seems like it should be possible. Like let's say you arrive in a city at a train station and find a tourist map. You take a picture of the map, point to your location on the picture, your phone saves your GPS coordinates. You minimally need to do this a second time to set the scale and from then on, the app should be able to overlay a virtual lat/long map and place you anywhere on it.

Not perfect, but free and at least lets you know directions to major landmarks.

OK, one good transit app is Metro. You download transit maps for the cities you visit ahead of time but then you can use in offline mode. I used it once in Madrid and it displayed the next set of metro trains and Cercanias trains from the stations I selected as my starting point.

But I will get a prepaid data SIM if there are reasonable rates. I bought an unlocked Mifi, because my iPhone isn't unlocked unfortunately.

Hotels in Europe rarely have great Wifi. Often the speed is barely enough to surf. You try to update your podcasts in iTunes and it will take hours. On top of that, even the free Wifi hotels are now offering "business class" Wifi for more $$$. And if these aren't issues, they often have cumbersome logging in procedures, often requiring you to log in for each session, after your computer has been asleep. Or they make it a hassle to use more than one device on the Wifi network.

So the mobile data is a great backup plan even at the hotel. Often can get faster speeds on my 7.2 Mbps-rated Huawei E585. So if I can get a couple of GB of data for 20-30 Euros, I go for it.

Maps are the most useful applications when you're out for the day. I was hoping for more from AR apps. but so far they're not that useful.

Looks like Yelp is slowly getting more reviews of overseas restaurants. TripAdvisor is useful, as long as you can appraise their reviews.

I think the killer would be a free app. that lets you load your custom Google Maps. I make custom maps with pinned locations of places I plan to visit as part of trip planning. Then I print out screenshots.

There are apps. which will open your custom Google Maps (the Google Maps app for iOS itself doesn't do this, though it invites you to log in with your Google account). But there's a lot of room for improvement here.

Of course, I'm not sure how many travelers are in the habit of making custom maps of places they plan to visit so maybe the appeal is limited.

Buying a local SIM is the best choice IMO. That of course means your phone is unlocked and for iPhones, that's not easy to do.

For me, I most often travel to the US, so I have a Straight Talk SIM card. Activating it for $45 for 30 days unlimited everything (no, I don't count throttling as capping) is cheaper than paying my home carrier for roaming data rates. And there's been a few times I've been able to pass the card to someone else while it's still active, saving friends/family money as well.

I just went through this on my trip to the Yucatan peninsula. What I would end up doing is opening google maps (On my iPhone), load up all the surrounding areas while on wifi at the hotel, then leave the app running. I could then go out and the GPS would update where I am and such. I can't search for things or plan routes. But I can find out where I am, and know how to get to a certain area. Which is nice when there is lots of 1 way roads.

I'm an iPod touch user so I'm in Wi-Fi only mode all the time. (also, no GPS!)

I tend to look up directions in Maps, or info about restaurants and other places I want to visit in Yelp! or Urban Spoon or the web site of the business when I have WiFi and then save a screenshot (home + sleep button at same time) to my camera roll of each of the results. That way even with no network I can go to my camera roll and pull up the entry for the place I'm headed to.

You pre-download maps you want from their huge global library for free once you buy the app. The maps include Point of Interest info too. I keep my local area and nearest big cities loaded all the time and add other areas when I travel. I've found that despite my device not having GPS, CityMaps2Go is pretty good at identifying where I am in the world. (I think it uses the SSID's of nearby WiFi networks to locate me) I had the app open with no WiFi to my device and was driving around rural Bucks County, PA and CityMaps2Go did a pretty amazing job of updating the location of that little blue dot that represented me.

I was in Lima, Peru for a while last year and I used my iPhone 4 for GPS all the time. If I got lost I'd just whip out my iPhone and hit the maps app to see where I was. Worked great without a data plan down there.

+1 for picking up local SIM cards; you can often get data-only connections on a daily, weekly or monthly basis for very affordable prices on pay-as-you-go plans. I was in mexico recently and picked up a Telcel sim card; activation (one-time cost) and a week's worth of data (200MB) set me back about $12USD or so. When I go back, I'll be able to reuse the same SIM and get the same data for about $5.

Buying a local sim worked great for me (30gbp for a month of calls & data), but beware if you have an iPhone 5 as the nano-sim can be really hard/impossible to buy on pre-pay. On a recent trip (Dec 2012) to London, I had to take out a monthly contract with Vodafone in order to get a nano-sim, which I could cancel effectively straight away and still use for a month. Luckily I still had bank accounts and credit cards etc in the UK, so I passed the credit check, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get a nano sim anywhere.. I guess, this will change with time, but something to bear in mind before travelling.

Why can't the GPS fall back to standalone receiver operation if a data connection is unavailable?

It is my understanding, the assisted GPS is used to find a rough location quickly, and then pinpoint the GPS location much quicker than what it'd take to wait for a 5-satellite fix.

If that's true, then they are basically crippling GPS functionality by making it unusable without a data connection, for the sake of perceived usability (faster GPS lock times). That's lame. Why can't both be offered?

I have a Garmin wristwatch with GPS accurate down to 10 or 20 feet or whatever it is. If standalone GPS receiver fits in a wristwatch, it would fit in a smartphone.

It can and it will. Even if you don't have a data connection, the phone will give you your current coordinates -- although it can take a while to get a GPS lock without A-GPS.

The problem is that just knowing your current coordinates doesn't help you much. You need map information to know how to get around.And the default applications for iOS (and Android) need to download it from the internet.

In Japan, apparently you can rent a mobile WiFi hotspot (unlimited data) for about $35/week, which makes all your problems go away. Especially important in Japan as you can't buy a prepaid SIM locally. (Incidental tip: though most ATMs aren't hooked up to the rest of the world, you can use the international-friendly ATMs at 7-11s.)

I realize the article was about iOS, but I had a great experience with my Lumia 900 in Ireland last August. The car rental company wanted €15/day (then 10 when we balked) for GPS rental. I had download Nokia's free map of Ireland (they're all free for Lumia owners) not knowing if it was an option I'd need to try. Indeed I needed and did try and I was blown away by the quality, transparency, and economy of Nokia Drive. There was, of course, no map data that needed to be transferred, but in addition, location services were nearly instantaneous, implying the cell-assist was in use...but I never noticed that my international data plan registered use for the location service. Bravo Nokia!

You do have to manually cache maps (panning and zooming in the area you want), but once you've done that, the caching is reliable and persistent. Custom icons are maintained, as are lines, shapes and place mark descriptions. Unfortunately, iOS 6 apparently messes up Google Maps tile caching in the app, making it less useful for overseas travel.

As a side note, rather than just turning off cellular data, I like taking out the SIM card out of my phone when I travel overseas (assuming I'm not getting a cheap prepaid one when I'm at my destination). This way I avoid accidentally answering a phone call and getting hit with a roaming voice charge, but can still have full GPS and wifi access.

Buying a local sim worked great for me (30gbp for a month of calls & data), but beware if you have an iPhone 5 as the nano-sim can be really hard/impossible to buy on pre-pay. On a recent trip (Dec 2012) to London, I had to take out a monthly contract with Vodafone in order to get a nano-sim, which I could cancel effectively straight away and still use for a month. Luckily I still had bank accounts and credit cards etc in the UK, so I passed the credit check, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get a nano sim anywhere.. I guess, this will change with time, but something to bear in mind before travelling.

Get a Micro Sim and head to London's China Town. Then get it cut down to a nano-sim size.

I can also recommend CityMaps2Go - great library of maps.I also found their Wikipedia add-on (one time in-app purchase) very useful - it downloads all geo-tagged Wikipedia articles for a specific map so you have offline information about the map in addition to the map itself.

Is there some reason this couldn't have been written platform agnostic? It has general useful tips for everyone and it wouldn't have taken much effort to suggest android or windows aps that would work similarly

One word: Maprika. You can create your own GPS maps from PDFs and other images and use them when off the data connection. It shows it being used for ski resort maps, but I've used this for parks, college campuses, just about anything.

I had a pretty great experience with Nokia Maps on my Lumia 920 when I was in Paris last month. Before I left, I simply downloaded the maps of Paris onto my phone and I would have fully offline maps while there, including things like business information, landmarks and basic public transport times (not as good as the dedicated Nokia Transport though, which does require a data connection).

AT&T has an international data plan that you can turn on for 1 month. I did the $60 300MB plan which includes 1GB of free wifi if you can find a place that offers it. It might sound expensive but it turned out to be indispensible for my 3 week trip to South America. With Android you get much better control over data usage and monitoring so with judiscious use I stayed just under the limit without having to go out of my way to find free wifi (which I've always been hesitant about using anyway) or really changing my smartphone usage much at all.

I haven't found the need to have a data plan at home, much less when traveling. WiFi is good enough and I'm not freaking out when I'm away from "home/hotel" and can't get some information.

Mobile data is for people who cannot plan just a little ahead. It is a convenience, not a necessity.* 100% Free Offline GPS apps exist - FreeNAV on Android for example* Just Save-As for any major sites you plan to visit before your trip. Make different subdirs for each different area/location. Get a map of the local metro lines too.* Prioritize the places so you don't miss or forget the ones you REALLY want to see.* Pull your SIM and test everything before you leave. Spend 1 day as a tourist in your city.* TripAdvisor has offline apps that seem to be reasonable, but definitely check other sources so you don't miss something cool.* Know 5-10 local phrases - no, yes, please, thank you, do you speak English?, where is ____? , "too much, half that price." Anki can help you memorize those in a few days, easily regardless of the language.* Be prepared if you lose the device. This happened to my small group at the beginning of a 12 day European trip that we planned on our own. 2 smartphones were stolen on day 1 and 2 in Barcelona. We had to deal with it for the next .. 10 days across France, Italy, Austria and Czech Republic. * Critical information should be on paper and kept under your clothes with the passport. Hotel addresses, contacts, emergency CC/cash. Was going to HKG with a buddy. He overslept and missed the flight. I got on it, but since he'd made all the reservations, I had expected him to handle getting to the hotel when we landed. I'd life my N800 in the car parked at the airport with all my travel data and plans. The day prior to leaving, I'd looked up the metro stop and hotel out of curiousity. That was enough to get me close enough to find the hotel. Since that trip, I have the hotel name, address and local phone number on paper with me.* I try to experience local festivals, local foods, local fun, and local history when I travel. I'm humble and try to point out the wonderful things that I see to locals and my travel companions. There is something wonderful about almost everywhere in the world. THAT is what I want to experience, even if 95% of everything else about the place sucks. Most places are 80% wonderful, 20% suck. Where I live is probably about that ratio too. * I try to hook up with locals who have similar hobbies too. Attending a LUG that isn't in my home country is a real experience, if the timing works.

Once the trip starts, relax. Things don't always go to plan. Realize that a smartphone is a tool, not a necessity. Turn it off, disconnect, enjoy. How useful is a smartphone on a 7 day trek in remote Nepal? A map, iodine, and compass are much more useful.